Colleges and universities, universities and colleges, colleges within universities, colleges as universities, whatever the equation, education and higher education have occasioned much gnashing of teeth over the years in the cultural wars that have come to typify the modern and postmodern worlds. One of the domains where these culture wars have been fought out in the modern and postmodern worlds is in the highly bureaucratised educational sectors of modern core nation societies, sectors that are thought by many to be central to the “proper” functioning of a modern and postmodern society. Talcott Parsons would certainly be fascinated by it all.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw no less gnashing of teeth about higher education and particularly higher liberal arts education then, well pick almost any date, the 1900s, the 1920s, 1960s. the 1980s, or the early 1990s as York University Canadian historian and social scientist Paul Axelrod reminds us in his Values in Conflict: The University, the Marketplace, and the Trials of Liberal Education (Montreal and Kingston: McGill University Press, 2002). If one can conceptualise the polemics and apologetics over higher education and particularly the polemics and apologetics over a liberal arts education as lying on a continuum with total “traditionalism"—however that is defined since, as Axelrod notes, the notion of what constitutes a liberal education has changed across time and even space—on one end of the spectrum and total innovation—again however that is defined since notions of innovation have changed too across time and space—on the other, Axelrod lies, I think, somewhere in the middle.
Axelrod recognises that things have changed not only educationally but politically, economically, culturally, geographically, and demographically in the modern and postmodern world and he recognises that higher education must adapt to those chances. At the same time Axelrod wants to preserve, in the midst of this change, the core of a what he defines as a liberal education for a postmodern world, a liberal education that encompasses creativity, autonomy restraint, control, intellectual breadth and specialisation, diversity, tolerance, and a liberal education that produces (or potentially produces) well rounded potential employees complete with essential good employee traits. The problem, as Axelrod notes, in making the argument for the contemporary importance and relevance of a liberal arts education is the important role economic elites and politicians with their education for a job “pragmatism” play in contemporary higher education and in higher education bureaucracies.
Axelrod, of course, is not the first polemicist and apologist writing on higher education to defend the value of a liberal arts education in the face of higher educational change and societal change. As Axelrod reminds us the eccentric social scientist Thorstein Veblen in his The Higher Learning in America of 1918 pointed out the dominance of business interests in the rise of the modern research university of the late 19th and early 20th century and the impact this was having on faculty activity, the university curriculum, and the governance of research universities, public or private, with their mania for new educational technologies (in Veblen’s era a mania for the modern Prussian and German higher education model), more students, and higher education public relations spin and decried it. As Veblen notes, by and large the US, and I would add the Canadian universities in the process of becoming research universities, largely chose not to follow the Oxbridge or Camford model of governance, one that gave academics control over their Oxbridge colleges at least until Margaret Thatcher assumed the throne in that green and “blessed" isle, something that says a lot about the cultural meanings and ideologies that dominate both nation-states.
One of the things that became central in the age of university expansion in the age of Veblen and after was branding, something Veblen notes was important to research universities when he was writing in the early part of the twentieth century. Spin doctoring has continued since Veblen’s day and has become central to colleges and universities as a even a brief gander at college and university Facebook pages quite clearly reveals (something that also brings to mind academic discussions of bullshite). One of the pieces of public relations universities particularly relied on after World War II, an era that saw an increase in government expenditures for education and particularly higher educational research, relevant research in particular, of course, and in students, was that education could prove helpful—particularly monetarily helpful—in the job market of the seemingly ever changing post World War II world.
These burgeoning research universities still had a bit of the old amidst the new in the era after World War II. They were characterised by a paternalism, a hangover from the higher education produces gentlemen and, if in a lesser and in a more circumscribed way, genteel ladies ideology, and they limited free speech. These research universities limped on in the early sixties and by the mid and late sixties were conceding some things to student activists during the “revolutionary” era which ended in loco parentis to some extent and only for the moment. They were also helped immensely by the seemingly never ending financial largesse of the government and growing corporations coming their way during the era.
And then the oil crisis hit followed by inflation and stagflation and later a host of capitalist booms and busts. In the wake of the oil crisis governments and corporations, both increasingly caught up by the passionate wet dream that there was money to made in them there gilded hills of economic globalisation. As Axelrod notes, the post oil crisis era was an era characterised by declining public support for colleges and universities. It was also, he notes, an era of increasing grade inflation in universities, increasing college and university reliance on student fees, private gifts, and targeted state support, mostly not for the liberal arts. It was an era characterised by the increasing corporatisation, bureaucratisation, consumerisation, and retailisation of universities, something which gave us, amongst other things, university and college speech codes and calls for universities in particular to remould themselves for the realities of the job market in a world where neo-liberalism with its belief in the market as god had triumphed at least for the moment, the new paternalism. And, perhaps even more importantly, it was an era in which new technologies, thanks to the triumph of the brave new digital world and its shiny new toys, new toys which bred speculation in universities, government, and business about how these shiny new toys might change higher education and how higher education “commodities” are delivered.
In a final coda Axelrod wonders about where universities might go in the wake of the early 21st century. Of course, writing from the vantage point of 2024 one has a little better idea about how to answer this question. Neo-liberalism remains dominant in the political culture of Canada, the United States, and England. Universities and colleges continue to pursue governmental, noblesse oblige, and corporate monies, and social media like FaceBook have simply added to the university and college penchant for pollyannaish spin doctoring or public relations work. Grade inflation continues at liberal arts centred universities where probably too many students with a limited interest in the liberal arts are matriculating given the continuing—and at this time still at least partially correct hypothesis— that more education equals more financial remuneration. Universities and colleges still try to be relevant though the relevance of Women’s Studies, African American Studies, and Latino and Latina Studies (Latinx Studies) has been increasingly overshadowed by “pragmatic” education” for the “new” economy and programmes like computer science, security studies, and data collection. The culture wars over higher education continue and right wing populists continue to maintain and expand their better poker hands thanks to claims that universities and colleges are dens of political correctness (hyperbole grounded in a selective gaze) though those making such polemical claims are themselves politically and ideologically correct (not to mention demagogic and hence skilled at manipulating the masses for political and ideological power ends) though not all of them seem to recognise the rather obvious fact that they are (hypocrisy). Events like the recent Israel-Hamas War have allowed authoritarian if not fascist university and college presidents or chancellors acting not only at their own behest but at the behest of boards of governance dominated by more “traditionalist” business types and rich donors, to increasingly rely on the surveillance and forceful arm of the increasingly militarised and fascist police (when it comes to outsider dissidents not to mention minorities) to maintain "law and order" on campus.
Axelrod’s book is an interesting addition to the culture war polemics and apologetics over education and higher education in a neo-liberal dominated world and a reminder that the culture wars over education seemingly, never stop. This educational theory and practise Sisyphus, like rust and decay, apparently never sleeps. In the end, as I was reading Values in Conflict, I, a child of the sixties for good and bad and a dystopian leaning student of utopianism whether of “left” or “right”, Bolshevik or capitalist, persuasion could’t help but muse about the fact that the more things change the more they seemingly stay the same. Values in Conflict made me even more certain that my scepticism about any form of social engineering, whether heartfelt or cynical, and whether educational or general, was misplaced and that utopian engineering of all stripes is likely doomed to failure in the long run. Additionally, I couldn’t help but muse about whether the liberal arts university and college and the liberal arts themselves will survive the latest utilitarian threats to them. I suspect they will survive in some form or another but likely largely at major high status and wealthy research universities like the University of Toronto and the University of Texas and in research colleges like Amherst, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar. Stay tuned for further episodes in the never ending saga of the Trials and Travails of a Liberal Arts Education coming next year to a theatre near you.
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